Why aren't scientists working on making larger trees? Or faster growing hardwood trees?We should be driving down the cost of lumber to basically zero. It seems like an extremely important issue and basically no organizations are working on it
Reforestation is a really good idea but it's never happening because of politics
>>16468460reforestation is great, but I believe a focus on improving the genes of lumber producing species would pay even greater dividends - imagine if each tree could grow 1% faster each year, or if wood was harder allowing for the use of less wood to make the same structure for a home.
>>16468460IIRC Iceland, Ireland, and Scotland have ongoing reforestation projects
Easy: Plant more trees now. It’s that simple. Go do your genetic engineering on trees, fine. But plan on decades before you get useful results. Meanwhile the trees you planted now will be fully grown.
>>16468456>Why aren't scientists working on making larger trees? Or faster growing hardwood trees?They are, e.g. hybrid poplars
>>16468550I don't know about Ireland's but Scotland's and Iceland's are very incipient, other places have done it way faster so I imagine there's some lack of political will behind it. Hell, there's examples of China turning desert areas green within a couple years, surely some small hamlet of an area that a small country like one of those tree would dedicate to that doesn't need to wait a century if only they actually wanted it. Iceland must be more tricky but Scotland and Ireland should be more straightforward. The West is like an old man who never has enough energy to do anything significant.Unrelated note: haven't posted in forever, now there's a 15 minute timer to do the captcha, let alone post? What is this horseshit, might as well pull the plug on the website (but I guess the glowies in charge still find value in the data generated, even if much of it isn't organic)
>>16468593>Easy: Plant more trees now. It’s that simple.A certain country had peopel planting trees. The locals were enraged, they often are, so they ripped them all up. not that long after they had a massive flooding that the trees were intended to hold back and people died in droves. Yet you still cannot get them to accept tree planting.
>>16468456Shut the fuck up libtard. G-d hates trees, fags, and hippies.——————————————Dave “Lightning” Miller‘69 Dodge Superbee (parts matching)USMC ‘89-‘90SEMPER FI!
>>16468456A tree's height is limited by capillary action and it's rate of growth is limited by solar insolation. It would be more interesting to try to make space adapted trees and start building an Ouster/Templar biosphere around the sun. It would require much more advances space capabilities than we have, but we could start working on the trees at least.
>>16468530Fast growing trees are weak and mostly suitable for paper production. Slow growing trees where the rings are very tight and more resilient. Proper forest stewardship also helps, but few care anyomore. Pic. related is what you can have when the forest has been handled right.
>>16468456Sure, with all the wildfires and a wildfire season that has practically become continuous, that is exactly what we need, more large swathes of tinderboxes that become highly flammable much quicker than they already do.
I'm not a treeologist but my impression has been that the faster you make a tree grow beyond its normal growth, the softer it will end up being. Perhaps there's a physics limit or botanical limit on how many inputs can be turned into wood in a given amount of time.
>>16471772Can calculate a theoretical limit from energy content of wood, photosynthetic efficiency, and solar insolation. At 19 MJ/kg, maximum average solar irradiance 300W/m^2, photosynthetic efficiency 3% gives 150 metric tons/hectare/year.Fastest growing actual trees currently seem to be about 20 tons/hectare/year but bamboo and some C4 grasses is more biomass (but no wood)
>>16468456Why lumber? Why not just develop seeds you plant that grow into houses?
>>16468456I am currently working towards this goal but my clean sterile laboratory won't be set up for at least a year. I have to fund and build it all myself. However simple gene gun GMO experiments should yield me promising results to gather more resources with. To be fair I haven't checked if anyone else is publicly working on GMO trees and they could always be doing it in private and we have no way to know. >>16468530It's a two bids with one stone situation. The #1 fast growing softwood for construction is of course Pine. Roughly 30 years from seedling to harvest for lumber. The shortest turnaround of any tree species, 1/3 the time as hardwood lumber, and 99% of construction uses softwood anyways. I love hardwoods for many reasons but 95% of lumber and pulp needs can be served by fast growing pine. So you would GMO pine to grow faster, say 20 years to harvest. I'm of course focusing my GMO goals on quicker carbon sequestration into the wood of the tree. Trees eat gaseous CO2 and convert it into hard lumber aka sequestration. The losers who claim this won't solve the excess atmospheric CO2 issues base this on one misguided untrue fact....that all those extra trees will be allowed to die and decay in the forest making about as much methane as they took out CO2, measured by damage done not volume. That's stupid, we wouldn't waste the wood. 90% of that new fast growing wood goes into homes and yes SKYSCRAPERS. Look up wooden frame large buildings. We GMO the trees to eat twice as much carbon, plant mecha-trees everywhere, harvest the lumber for goods and homes, No housing crisis, no excess CO2 in the atmosphere. It's really that easy....but then a lot of rich people lose a lot of money unless they are in the right industries to capitalize on this great advancement of society. Always and forever the greedy elites at the top will sabotage progress if it threatens their entrenched monopolies on profits or power. (1/2)t. mad horticulturalist
>>16468593Based take, plant trees, enough said.>>16468644>Hybrid poplarsNot useful for anything but firewood or pulp unlike yellow pine. Also seems the hybrids are weak genetically and have many diseases. I'm also curious in it's CO2 uptake rates per year vs a normal poplar. Simple breeding without hideously unnatural GMO splicing won't yield the results we need to do the things that need to be done. >>16468971Stupidest take ITT>16470777Incorrect as I stated Yellow Pine is what most homes in the USA and Canada are made out of. GMO means you can make hardwoods grow faster and make softwoods grow stronger. Simple as, STFU.>16471764Second stupidest take ITT based on fantasy>16471772Using traditional breeding sure, like someone posted the Hybrid Popular. It's weak, shit. GMO solves all these issues as you are cutting out all the bad parts and adding things to boost up where you need it. Like putting hardwood genes into Pine to make it stronger. >>16471805>but bamboo and some C4 grassesDING DING DING.....we have a winner Johnny!!! That's right, I will be working with C4 grass genes to work them into trees. Good job anon, not stupid after all.(2/2)blame the spam filter for me not properly tagging your post.
>>16471864How exactly are the trillions of dollars in damages from wildfires over the past couple of decades fantasies?
>>16468456>We should be driving down the cost of lumber to basically zero.The cost of lumber isn't because of tree supply as someone mentioned wildfires, it is because of all the processing and treatment necessary to turn a tree into construction quality lumber.
>>16468460>never happening because of politics*costs moneyNothing stopping you spending your own money to buy land and grow trees of your choice on it. But you want other people to be forced to pay for it, hence you've run into problems (its not your money).
>>16468530>imagine if each tree could grow 1% faster each yearThis is an interesting topic: what plant grows woody tissue the fastest? Bamboo is always touted as growing a meter a day, but I think that's only after the rest of the plant has stored up energy over a year.Essentially the question is "what plant puts on the highest dry-weight biomass by % of it's body weight?".Preferably we could eventually genetically engineer/domesticate a tree to grow easily harvested, thick, long, and strait branches which would allow the rest of the tree to stay alive and heal, then grow new limbs. As if harvesting fruit but wood instead. This reduces the time wasted by the tree growing from a sapling.
>>16470777a significant time for trees to grow to harvestable size is wasted growing from seed to maturity. GE/domestication could eliminate this
>>16471854>Trees eat gaseous CO2 and convert it into hard lumber aka sequestration.Other than putting wood in buildings, how else is this hoped to be accomplished?I doubt the construction market can be enticed to adopt wood in large constructions on these matters: Ease of construction; concrete is set easily, build a mold, pour a liquid in. Wood doesn't appear as simple as that. Increase time and skill of labor drives costs.Strength to price ratio; raw wood might conceivably be engineered into a material strong enough to compete with steel/concrete, but how does this effect it's price compared to current materials?Fire; wood burns unlike steel/concrete, are currently avalible cladding materials sufficient to protect the structure from fire? When wood or steel heat up they weaken, does wood weaken at a lower temperature than steel? Wood insulates heat, in a steel construction, a beam heated in one portion will have the heat wicked away, keeping it cooler for longer.>No housing crisisThat's a matter of government intervention in the market; restricting supply of new houses via regulations (need permission to build a house on your own land!) and encouraging mass migration with welfare, causing increased demand for homes.
>>16471854>I am currently working towards this goal but my clean sterile laboratory won't be set up for at least a yearI don't think you really need that advanced of equipment to do this type of research do you? I don't know
>>16468456>Optimizing Rubisco and its regulation for greater resource use efficiencyhttps://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/pce.12425
>>16468456plastic is already a perfected form of lumberlumber is just fibers with glue (cellulose bonded with lignin)So the same as some micarta-like type of materialAll you need is fibers and a bonding plastic, but fibers can also be made of plastic so, plain plastic is enoughYou can make a house from plastic
>>16473289Concrete is good for compressive strength but is unsuitable for tensile and shear forces. Wood is suitable for both.Wood is nature's own composite, a cellulose reinforced lignine matrix.You can make large structures such as bridges with wood but it requries skill.
>>16468456wow genius you figured it out.you might actually have a point there might be some way to bio-engineer trees but you would have to watch what it does to the soil
>>16473276The government already wastes billions of taxpayer dollars on retarded initiatives, it'd be a nice change of pace for them to finally adhere to their mandate and govern with national and citizen welfare in mind
>>16475758oil is almost dried up though
